The opening of a dialogue between a buried past and an unfinished present: photojournalism and history

Abstract

Forced disappearance, based on the denial, concealment and distortion of the truth, has sown the earth with testimonies condemned to oblivion. This violence, which re-victimises the victims and their families, hinders their documentary coverage.                          The invisibility of the method has relegated the absent to the unmentionable, the taboo, the forbidden, the unimaginable, the unbelievable; passing off their experience as an invention. Faced with the danger of constructing the story in a unidirectional way, from a journalistic point of view, it becomes necessary to break down the walls of silence and collectively take up again those unfinished coverages that repressive models censored and truncated and that, at present, continue to make it impossible to reconstruct the truth of the victim.